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Documentary across Disciplines offers a provocative, well-curated cross-disciplinary collection of writings that redefine the idea of the documentary beyond its usual confines in film studies. This inspiring work—edited by the London-based film scholar Erika Balsom and the Berlin-based Hila Peleg, a curator, filmmaker, and artistic director of the Berlin Documentary Forum—provides a reading experience that fulfills its promise to expand the concept of documentary beyond filmmaking. It includes topics related to the representation of actuality, evidence, and indexicality for a twenty-firstcentury context. Works explore how postcolonial subjectivity and new understandings of agency relate to a wide range of forms of documentary art, moving image, and new media. This broad frame makes the collection relevant for students and scholars of contemporary visual studies, new media studies, and social science audiovisual ethnography, as well as scholars and practitioners within film studies.
In their introduction, the editors explain that Documentary across Disciplines emerged out of a desire to redefine documentary practice in the context of what is often referred to as "the documentary turn" in the realm of contemporary visual art.1 Referencing the proliferation of documentary media projects in the international art world, the book does not so much grapple with examples from contemporary visual art as concern itself with expanding the concept of documentary practices in general. The wide variety of objects of study in the anthology does not directly reflect the implied context of the contemporary visual art world. Rather, as the editors note, the collected essays offer "a corrective to historical myopia and diffuse[d] the claims of novelty that sometimes accompany documentary in an art context, while also illuminating the specificity of the present."2 Yet despite this implied context for visual art practitioners, the book offers illuminating and field-expanding approaches for documentary film studies and beyond. Novel documentary practices considered include photography as an ethnographic tool for anthropological research, archived audio interviews divorced from their original historical context, nonvisual media such as biometric and atmospheric data from surveillance technologies, new types of recording technologies that represent nonhuman and environmental subjects, and police videos used as evidence in criminal court cases.
The form the book takes is also notable. The chapters in Documentary across Disciplines both stand alone as individual pieces and interrelate,...